This is one of the strangest episodes of The Real Jewelry Shoppers of the Union Square Kmart that I’ve ever witnessed. It introduces all of these questions surrounding a trip to Mexico that quickly become moot. It’s as if you spent a whole day baking a pie and then, as you were taking it out of the oven, you dropped the pie on the ground and the pie plate shattered and peach-blueberry juice splattered all over your feet and then you had to go to the hospital to be treated for third-degree burns.
Gosh, I really would like some pie now.
Most of this episode is about whether or not Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Pyrex Glass Factory Morgans will be invited to the trip Bethenny planned to Mexico that involves tequila factories, helicopters, caviar, and Ramona debuting her new one-piece that she ordered from the internet. I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like a very good time, especially if you don’t invite Sonja and Luann.
Let’s be honest: Sonja and Luann were always going to be the most fun part of this vacation. Say what you will about Sonja, but she knows how to have a good time. Also, she knows how to take one for the team when a member of your party gets unruly. Remember Scary Island? Who was there to hold Kelly Killoren Bensimon’s satchels of gold? It wasn’t Bethenny. It was Sonja, who was trying to use her drunk-person telepathy skills to put herself on the same wavelength as Kelly, like she was the Great Gazoo or some shit. You want Sonja around when things are going well, and you want Sonja around when things are going poorly. If I ever decide to try ayahuasca, it’s going to be on Sonja’s imaginary yacht.
Luann, well, you just want her to bring dudes around and encourage your worst behavior. The Countess is an instigator. She’s making the plans, she’s inviting along slutty guys who look like Johnny Depp, she’s making sure married men take Ubers home after she makes out with them rather than pass out naked in an empty bed and scare the bejesus out of everyone in the morning. How are you not going to take these two on vacation?
I also love how Bethenny is convinced this would be a “grown up†trip. “This wasn’t going to be a shit-show trip,†she tells Dorinda. “This was going to be a really good trip.†Oh, Bethenny. She has a serious case of “not my kids.†You know when you go out to dinner and you see a table of screaming children and it drives you insane and you say, “My kids will never be like that.†Cut to ten years later when little Ella just barfed on someone’s shoe after eating too much pizza and grape soda, and little Cash has climbed up on the Chuck E. Cheese stage and is humping one of the members of the animatronic band. That is how Bethenny thinks about her trip. She thinks that if she doesn’t invite the partiers, it will be unlike every other Housewives vacation in all of history. She thinks that, somehow, it won’t quickly descend into drunken tirades at dinner and recriminations over breakfast. She’s still going to invite Ramona Singer, who has a negative 1 million star rating on Trip Advisor. She’s the human equivalent of getting a kidney stone on the beach in Nicaragua.
I do appreciate Dorinda’s advice to Jules about going on a Housewives trip, though, and that is to pass up the first several rounds of rosé. If you start drinking at lunch, you’re screaming about etiquette by the time dinner rolls around, and then crying out on the lanai where you try to sneak a cigarette without the cameras looking. At least Dorinda learned from her past mistakes.
Meanwhile, before Sonja is even invited on the trip, she’s worried about how she can get herself invited on the trip. She even has Ramona over to rehearse how she would apologize to Bethenny at the upcoming dog wedding. (That is a combination of words that should forever be stricken from the English language, but we live in the year of our lord 2016 and we cannot.) They do this through role play. As soon as Ramona says the words “role play†in Sonja’s boudoir (you know she calls it a “boudoirâ€), Sonja goes straight for the closet and puts on her fedora and trench coat to play her favorite role-playing game: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (Carmen Sandiego is the name of Sonja’s hoo-ha.)
Anyway, Ramona does a killer Bethenny impression with an emphasis on her clipped nasal delivery and she coaches Sonja on how to stand there and just say, “I’m sorry. Forgive me,†over and over. That is lousy advice to give Sonja. She’s going to sound like a complete moron if she just stands there and repeatedly says, “I’m sorry. Forgive me.†She’ll be like the Real Housewives of Hodor, and eventually she’ll just start muttering “Imsfme. Imsfme,†over and over again as the armies of the dead try to pluck off her weave north of the Wall.
All of this is moot, though: Bethenny cancels the trip because of her bloody vagina. I should not make light of her lady-part problems because they seem pretty damn bad. She needs surgery and she seems really freaked out by it, just as I would if I needed to get surgery on my nether regions. Actually, I have — thanks to a kidney stone on a beach in Nicaragua — but this is not about my genitals, it is about Bethenny’s.
It’s also about Jules’s genitals, because she got some kind of cut or bruise on her coochie from straddling a window? I don’t know, this whole story sounds very complex. It’s so shrouded in euphemism that I don’t know exactly what happened where. Not that if I had more information I would really know what I’m talking about. The vagina is sort of like Machu Picchu: It’s beautiful and complex; I know where it is, and I never want to visit.
Naturally, Jules takes a picture of her bruised cooch and shows it to Sonja, who, being a cooch expert, not only stares at the picture for a long time, but does the finger-pinching motion to blow up Jules’s vagina so she can really see what’s going on up in there. The thought of anyone having their genitals zoomed in like that is, quite frankly, disturbing. I like the genitals in my life to be either far away or inside of me. If it’s up in my face, it’s because it’s in my face, not because I’m staring at it.
So yes, thanks to ruined vaginas, the trip is cancelled. I’m a little disappointed because, between Luann not being invited and then inviting herself and then being uninvited and Sonja not being invited and then assuming that she could be invited if she could “Imsfme†her way on the trip, I needed the plane to take off just to know who was actually going to attend. It was like the world’s most convoluted Evite.
And of course, this all goes down at the doggy wedding. Ugh. I begrudgingly have to give it to Senator Rick Santorum. He was all like, “If we let the gays get married, then animals are going to be next.†Well, it happened. He was right. Dogs now think they can go registering at PetSmart for his-and-hers leashes and double-wide piddle pads and double-ended tugging ropes. In fact, Simon Doonan gives away the bride, which is sort of Rick Santorum’s greatest nightmare: a homosexual marrying a dog.
The whole dog wedding is weird, especially because the Fat Jewish — the Instagram star whose dog is the one getting married — doesn’t even show up to his own daughter’s wedding. How fitting for this episode where everything that happens doesn’t really happen. It’s like some bizarre wormhole into a netherworld where actions have no equal and opposite reaction, a terrible place where all vaginas do is get hurt.
While Ramona Singer was cutting the first piece of doggie wedding cake all for herself, the other women were sitting around with their dogs lying at their feet and not tending to their leashes. They were talking about what they should do instead of going to Mexico and Carole was dreaming about the vegan dessert that Adam was going to give her when she got home. While she was lost in her reverie, a red-headed Chihuahua came over, shaking its little hind legs not out of anxiety, which is natural for the breed, but because the dog had revenge on her mind.
This little bitch came over to Carole’s dog, Baby, and started sniffing around, first at her undercarriage and then at her butt. The two of them do-si-do-ed around each other in a complicated dance of pheromones and intention, the redhead hopping a little bit every time she had to cross Baby’s leash, which was dragging on the marble floor of the event space. The interloper took a few steps away, careful to avoid all the human legs standing in the crowd, and then stopped, looked behind her, and then forward again, as if she were motioning to Baby to follow her. She was.
The two of them trotted across the floor, under the chairs lined up in perfect rows, past the bar three-people-deep ordering champagne cocktails, past the wheelchair for America’s oldest surviving former coat-check girl, Cindy Adams. They made their way past the cake and the sponsor’s banners, past the step and repeat and the pit full of photographers from less-respectable photo agencies. As a cater waiter pushed open a door, they scurried in behind her, both just making it through like Indiana Jones diving away from a rolling boulder.
The redhead went through the stairwell first, her gait stuttering as her tiny legs tried to descend the rather large stairs. Baby didn’t have as difficult a time, and she quickly arrived at a landing at the bottom of the stairs with a door propped open. The night and some small flakes of snow that were just falling peeked inside, as if it seeing whether they could survive indoors. Baby went out into the night and her new friend stayed just on the other side of the door. She let out three quick barks and the door slammed shut, leaving Baby out in the cold, the snow kissing her coat like an absent lover. The other dog stood still, staring at the door as if she could see through it, and then started barking, as if emitting a code, as if trying to tell Baby she was sorry or glad or didn’t quite like the smell of her. Ginger Zarin just stood there, her legs shaking, while the echo of her barks tickled her ears like dandelion seeds lolling on the breeze.